consensus would be better, but it's not essential. There's a choice to be made between a flawed constitutional process on the one hand, on the other, impunity for a leading public figure ostentatiously undermining a collective effort to curb a pandemic. That's a political choice. https://twitter.com/renshai1001/status/1327343308738326532

amongst legal academics, there's been a lot of discussion about the appropriateness of the process but not as much about the standard. 'Stated misbehaviour' is essentially indeterminate. not indefinitely so, because it's plausible a court would place some outer limits on how ...

... the Oireachtas might define it. But apart from that, the Oireachtas is free to define it &probably has wide discretion in doing that. It probably is free - if it chooses - to define it as encompassing extra-judicial conduct it regards as unethical or detrimental to public..

... confidence in the courts. I think we need to avoid argument about what the standard is, and instead focus on what it should be, because we have to recognise the Oireachtas' political freedom - for better or worse - in defining it.

it might seem unfair or contrary to natural justice to accuse somebody based on so indefinite a standard. It's true that it would be better to have a codified definition of judicial ethics. But it's also true that in disciplinary settings generally, such codifications are never..

... fully exhaustive, if you like; there is nearly always some fall-back catch-all standard anyway, conduct unbecoming sort of stuff, which catches sui generis, unanticipated or unusual cases.

it might seem objectionable, on various grounds (&yes, it is certainly far from ideal) for a norm or standard like this to be defined as it is applied, rather than in advance of its application for the sake of clarity &so on. But that indeterminacy is a feature of norms generally

... it is only unusually pronounced or obvious in this case. The relative indeterminacy & vagueness of the norm is a pity and a drawback, certainly, but only one factor to be weighed in the equation & not something which makes the process unfair or illegimate as such, in my view

the TLDR: there's a lot of talk about the standard for impeachment 'not being met' in this case. I think that overstates the determinacy of the standard itself and downplays the role of the Oireachtas in defining it in fairly sui generis or unanticipated cases.